Individuals often lack the infrastructure to set up and maintain remote computer-readable storage media. Existing systems provide a business model that provides access to remote computer-readable storage media to multiple individual consumers via common networking protocols and mechanisms, such as the ubiquitous World Wide Web (WWW). Traditionally, those offering such remote backup services to individual consumers maintain one or more data centers comprising the computer-readable storage media that is being used to remotely store the consumers' computer-readable data.
In existing peer-to-peer (P2P) resource exchange systems, individual users (e.g., peers) provide resources in exchange for resources from other users. To incentivize users to provide their resources, an accounting system keeps track of how many resources each user has supplied and consumed, to make sure this is balanced in the long run. These systems get more complicated, however, when the resources from different supplying peers are bundled before they can be consumed by other peers. If the system is flexible enough such that different peers can supply different amounts of the resources, simply balancing each user's account per resource is inefficient because it ignores the different users' preferences. Existing systems fail to elicit user preferences and to determine the optimal exchange rate or prices between the different resources such that system efficiency is maximized.